It has been a continuing challenge to develop a computer keyboard that has display functionality. One particular difficulty is that two or more application programs may desire access to display output to the keyboard at the same time. No convenient mechanism exists to resolve conflicts between display requests from differing applications. Further, there may be confusion in routing input from the keyboard to these different application programs, as well as routing output from the application programs to display output on the keyboard. As a result, development of application programs for such keyboards has not advanced significantly to date.